BOOKS A Man of the World and a Man of the Town a. S O MER S E .'1' 1!1 r8 MAUGHAM IS . SI" one of those who \ !;)Q \: \:.lJ(3Ht seem to be born CIV- r I ilized. If he were '. ever on trial for his life, there might be ;(i some difficulty in as- (JY4J bl "' f CUÑ sem Ing a Jury 0 his exact peers. Probably they would not be found among his colleagues of the literary profession, most of whom, be it noted, Mr. Maugham heartily detests. Mr. Maugham is perfectly realistic about his work, which he knows is brilliant and second-rate, but he does not Baun t his cynicism in the manner of N oe} Coward, like a self-conscious youngster nonchalantly displaying to the world his first long trousers. Mr. Maugham takes his own disillusion with a grain of salt, calmly, without empha- sis, quite in the manner of the English- men described in French and American novels. Yet there is no false, epicene elegance about him; he writes with force and solidity, and his prose is cleanly. During a brief period of belief, he wrote "Of Human Bondage." Since then, all passions spent save that of burning contempt for baseness and vul- garity, he has been content to turn out plays and stories of finished and ap- parently negligent craftsmanship. He is always interesting and never absorb- ing; always intelligent and intelli- gible but quite without the passion, the frenzy that he admires in the great Russians. His mind is made up. He observes the vagaries of humans with a sympathy which enlists the reader's eager interest but which never betrays Maugh;:tm himself into anything like abandon. Thus his insights are always shrewd, rarely deep; and his stories are more remarkable for their lucidity and formal perfection than for those more enduring qualities that we as- sociate with the masters. He never lifts you up; but, on the other hand, he never lets you down. In one of the best of the six tales contained in his new volume, "Ah King" (Doubleday, Doran), he makes a character (obviously very near to his own heart) say: "If to look truth in the face and not resent it when it's un- palatable, and take human nature as you find it, smiling when it's absurd and grieved without exaggeration when it's pitiful, is to be cynical, then I sup- pose I'm a cynic." There is a casual gravity about the statement which re- moves it completely from the Anatole France pity-and-irony literary attitude. His skepticism is palatable. "Ah King" is good Maugham, though none of the stories, I think, is as satisfying as the best ones in "First Per- son Singular." They deal with the lives of more or less civilized Europeans set down in the alien and irritating tropical environment of the Federated Malay States. The basis of the tales, as is usu- al with Maugham, who has a very shrewd eye for the demands of com- merce, is melodrama. "F ootprints in the Jungle" is a newspaper crime pas- sionnel raised to the level of artistry. "The Door of Opportunity" tells the tale of a man who loses the love of his wife because he fails to show the proper Anglo-Saxon courage at a critical mo- ment. "The Vesse] of Wrath" is an impossible but utterly charming farce, in the old Kipling manner, about a sodden remittance man who is re- deemed by the assiduity of a red-nosed female missionary. "The Book-Bag" (the best of the six stories) plays some chilling variations on the incest theme. "The Back of Beyond" ingeniously \ . 81 combines adultery, suicide, violence, and cynicism. "Neil MacAdam" is "Rain" with Russian dressing.. The "situations" are all fairly stock, as are the characters. But the material is handled with such careless ease and yet with such respect for its artistic pos- sibilities that we find ourselves enchant- ed. The personality of Maugham himself runs through every seemingly objective page. To read these stories is like listening to the reminiscen tial talk of a man who has been everywhere and seen everything, but who prefers not to absorb too much, not to take anything either too seriously or too frivolously. Among those writers who steer a kind of middle course between first-rate art and first-rate entertain- ment, Somerset Maugham emerges foremost by a generous margin. He is as good a writer as a man of the world can possibly be. S TANLEY WALKER is city editor of the New York Herald Tribune, a man of comparatively few inches, comparatively few pounds, and incom- parably enormous vitality. About that part of New York which makes loud noises and lands on the front page he undoubtedly knows as much as anyone living, and what he knows leaves him interested rather than appalled. Ap- paren tl y he can get all he wants out of human life without once going north \ ((TVe only got one sirloin steak left, buddy, an' I'm gonna eat it.))